As submission misses pile up, I am thrilled to announce that my story “The Black Room” will debut in the next It Calls anthology from Eerie River Publishing…It Calls from the Doors. To be released in a few months.

Like the Sea and Sky and Forest, this one revolves around something we all know: doors. But unlike those other real-world features, which are grand and intimidating, doors are small and ordinary.

They are not scary in and of themselves; it’s what’s behind them that’s scary, or behind you when those doors won’t open. Doors shut when we desperately need them open. They open when we’d do anything to keep them shut.

They lure us away from the safe and easy path. They trap us. They save us from the thing on the other side, but not from our own minds.

My hope is that this next anthology, aside from scaring us, will give us a better idea what dark, terrible, vile, and magical things might be waiting beyond the doors of our normal, banal experience.

Either way, I’m stoked to be a part of this anthology. For it, I offer my own humble suggestion for what may lurk “out there” or “in here” (far beyond the “door” of our breastbones and deep within our thin skulls).

And I hope it can further us along in our effort to accept that we don’t know shit about reality, that the world is chaotic and scary and full of endless mystery, and that’s okay.

Stories are doors that offer us a thrilling way out of our personal experience, some reprieve from the “real” scares of life. But when those stories are experienced with the door to our real lives still open, they can help us confront our hard realities with more ease and wonder.

We can’t know everything, can’t control everything, can’t do everything, can’t have everything. Can’t BE everything. Nor can we know what’s behind every door. But we can loosen our hearts a little and see where life takes us, what it opens to us.

With so many doors out there, the discovery never has to end. Anything is possible. Life never gets boring. The magic and mystery never dims or fades.

The doors are all around. Some may be closed. Some may be locked. Some may be open wide. Others may present only a thin interstice of enticing light or forbidding black.

But all of them contain things to discover. And that makes life worth living.

It Calls from the Doors now available on Amazon.